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Ed Roberts (computers)
Encyclopedia
Henry Edward "Ed" Roberts (September 13, 1941 – April 1, 2010) was an American engineer, entrepreneur and medical doctor who designed the first commercially successful personal computer in 1975. He is most often known as "the father of the personal computer
". He founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems
(MITS) in 1970 to sell electronics kits to model rocket
ry hobbyists, but the first successful product was an electronic calculator kit that was featured on the cover of the November 1971 issue of Popular Electronics
. The calculators were very successful and sales topped one million dollars in 1973.
A brutal calculator price war left the company deeply in debt by 1974. Roberts then developed the Altair 8800
personal computer that used the new Intel 8080
microprocessor. This was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, and hobbyists flooded MITS with orders for this $397 computer kit.
Bill Gates
and Paul Allen
joined MITS to develop software and Altair BASIC
was Microsoft's
first product. Roberts sold MITS in 1977 and retired to Georgia where he farmed, studied medicine and eventually became a small-town doctor.
. After the war, the family returned to Miami, but Roberts would spend his summers with his grandparents in rural Georgia. Roberts' father had an appliance repair business in Miami.
Roberts became interested in electronics and built a small relay-based computer while in high school. He entered University of Miami
with the intention of becoming a doctor. There he met a neurosurgeon who shared his interest in electronics. The doctor suggested that Roberts get an engineering degree before applying to medical school, and Roberts changed his major to electrical engineering.
Roberts married Joan Clark while at the university, and when she became pregnant Roberts knew he would have to drop out of school to support his new family. The U.S. Air Force
had a program that would pay for college, and in May 1962 he enlisted with the hope of finishing his degree through the Airman Education & Commissioning Program.
After basic training Roberts attended the Cryptographic
Equipment Maintenance School at Lackland Air Force Base
in San Antonio, Texas. Because of his electrical engineering studies at college, Roberts was made an instructor at the Cryptographic School when he finished the course. To augment his meager enlisted man's pay, Roberts worked on several off-duty projects and even set up a one man company, Reliance Engineering. The most notable job was to create the electronics that animated the Christmas characters in the window display of Joske's
department store in San Antonio. In 1965 he was selected for an Air Force program to complete his college degree and become a commissioned officer. Roberts earned an electrical engineering degree from Oklahoma State University in 1968 and was assigned to the Laser Division of the Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB
in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
at the Weapons Laboratory, and both shared an interest in model rocketry. Mims was an advisor to the Albuquerque Model Rocket Club and met the publisher of Model Rocketry
magazine at a rocketry conference. This led to an article in the September 1969 issue of Model Rocketry; "Transistorized Tracking Light for Night Launched Model Rockets". Roberts, Mims and two other lab coworkers, Stan Cagle and Bob Zaller, decided they could design and sell electronics kits to model rocket hobbyists. Roberts wanted to call the new company Reliance Engineering, but Mims wanted to form an acronym similar to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MIT. Cagle came up with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, MITS. They advertised the light flasher, a roll rate sensor with transmitter and other kits in Model Rocketry, but the sales were disappointing.
Mims wrote an article about the new technology of light-emitting diodes that was to be published in the November 1970 issue of Popular Electronics
magazine. He asked the editors if they also wanted a project story, and they agreed. Roberts and Mims developed a LED communicator that would transmit voice on an infrared beam of light to a receiver hundreds of feet away. Readers could buy a kit of parts to build the Opticom LED Communicator from MITS for $15. MITS sold just over a hundred kits. Mims was now out of the Air Force and wanted to pursue a career as a technology writer. Roberts bought out his original partners and focused the company on the emerging market of electronic calculators.
computer. His office at the Weapons Laboratory had the state of the art Hewlett-Packard 9100A
programmable calculator in 1968. Roberts had always wanted to build a digital computer and in July 1970, Electronic Arrays announced a set of six LSI integrated circuits that would make a four-function calculator. Roberts was determined to design a calculator kit and got fellow Weapons Laboratory officers, William Yates and Ed Laughlin, to invest in the project with time and money.
The first product was a "four-function" calculator; it could add, subtract, multiply and divide. The display was only 8 digits, but the calculations were performed with 16 digits of accuracy. The MITS Model 816 calculator kit was featured on the November 1971 cover of Popular Electronics. The kit sold for $179 and an assembled unit was $275. Unlike the previous kits MITS had offered, thousands of calculator orders came in each month.
The monthly sales reached $100,000 in March 1973 and MITS moved to a larger building with 10,000 square feet (930 square meters) of space. In 1973 MITS was selling every calculator they could make, 110 employees worked in two shifts assembling calculators. The functionality of calculator integrated circuits increased at a rapid pace and Roberts was designing and producing new models. The popularity of electronic calculators drew the traditional office equipment companies and the semiconductor companies into the market. In September 1972, Texas Instruments (TI) introduced the TI-2500 portable four-function calculator that sold for $120. The larger companies could sell below cost to win market share. By early 1974, Ed Roberts found he could purchase a calculator in a retail store for less than his cost of materials. MITS was now $300,000 in debt, and Roberts was looking for a new hit product.
Roberts decided to return to the kit market with a low cost computer. The target customer would think that "some assembly required" was a desirable feature. In April 1974 Intel released the 8080 microprocessor that Roberts felt was powerful enough for his computer kit but each 8080 chip sold for $360 in small quantities. Roberts felt the price of a computer kit had to be under $400; to meet this price he agreed to order 1000 microprocessors from Intel for $75 each. Roberts did the circuit design and Bill Yates did the circuit board layout. The company was down to 20 employees and a bank loan for $65,000 financed the design and initial production of the new computer. Roberts told the bank he expected to sell 800 computers but he guessed it would be around 200.
Art Salsberg, editorial director of Popular Electronics, was looking for a computer construction project, and his technical editor, Les Solomon, knew MITS was working on an Intel 8080 based computer kit. Roberts assured Solomon that the project would be complete by November to meet the press deadline for the January 1975 issue. The first prototype was finished in October and shipped to Popular Electronics in New York for the cover photograph, but it was lost in transit. Solomon already had a number of pictures of the machine, and the article was based on them. Roberts and Yates got to work on building a replacement. The computer on the magazine cover was an empty box with just switches and LEDs on the front panel. The finished Altair computer had a completely different circuit board layout than the prototype shown in the magazine.
MITS products typically had generic names such as the Model 1440 Calculator or the Model 1600 Digital Voltmeter. The editors of Popular Electronics wanted a more alluring name for the computer. MITS technical writer, David Bunnell
, came up with three pages of possible names, but Roberts was too busy finishing the computer design to choose a name. There are several versions of the story of who selected Altair as the computer name. At the first Altair Computer Convention (March 1976), Les Solomon told the audience that the name was inspired by his 12-year-old daughter, Lauren. "She said why don't you call it Altair – that's where the [Star Trek] Enterprise is going tonight." The December 1976 issue of Popular Science misquoted this account giving credit to Ed Roberts' daughter. His only daughter, Dawn, was not born until 1983. Both of these versions have appeared in many books, magazines and web sites.
Another editor, Alexander Burawa, recalls a less dramatic version. The Altair was originally going to be named the PE-8 (Popular Electronics 8-bit), but Les Solomon thought this name to be rather dull, so Solomon, Burawa, and John McVeigh decided that: "It's a stellar event, so let's name it after a star." McVeigh suggested "Altair", the twelfth-brightest star in the sky.
When the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics reached readers in mid-December 1974, MITS was flooded with orders. They had to hire extra people just to answer the phones. In February, MITS received 1,000 orders for the Altair 8800. The quoted delivery time was 60 days but it was many more months before the machines were shipped. By August 1975, they had shipped over 5,000 computers.
The Altair 8800 computer was a break-even sale for MITS. They needed to sell additional memory boards, I/O boards and other options to make a profit. The April 1975 issue of the MITS newsletter, Computer Notes, had a page-long price list that offered over 15 optional boards. The delivery time given was 60 or 90 days, but many items were never produced and dropped from future price lists. Initially, Roberts decided to concentrate on production of the computers. Prompt delivery of optional boards did not occur until October 1975.
There were several design and component problems in the MITS 4K Dynamic RAM board. By July, new companies such as Processor Technology
were selling 4K Static RAM boards with the promise of reliable operation. Ed Roberts acknowledged the 4K Dynamic RAM board problems in the October 1975 Computer Notes. The price was reduced from $264 to $195 and existing purchasers got a $50 refund. MITS released its own 4K Static RAM board in January 1976.
Several other companies started making add-in boards and the first clone, the IMSAI 8080
, was available in December 1975.
and Paul Allen worked for Honeywell
in Boston when they saw the Altair computer on the cover of Popular Electronics. They had previously written software for the earlier Intel 8008
microprocessor and knew the Intel 8080 was powerful enough to support a BASIC
interpreter. They sent a letter to MITS claiming to have a BASIC interpreter for the 8080 microprocessor. Roberts was interested, so Gates and Allen began work on the software. Both had experience with the Digital Equipment Corporation
PDP-10
minicomputers that they would use. Allen modified the DEC Macro Assembler to produce code for the Intel 8080 and wrote a program to emulate the 8080 so they could test their BASIC without having an Altair computer. Using DEC's BASIC-PLUS language as a guide, Gates determined what features would work with the limited resources of the Altair computer. Gates then started writing the 8080 assembly-language code on yellow legal pads. In February Gates and Allen started using a PDP-10 at Harvard to write and debug BASIC. They also enlisted another Harvard student, Monte Davidoff
, to write the floating-point math routines.
Paul Allen flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in March 1975 to test BASIC on a real Altair 8800 computer. Roberts picked him up at the airport in his pickup truck and drove to the nondescript storefront where MITS was located. Allen was not impressed. The Altair computer with 7 kB of memory that BASIC required was still being tested and would not be ready until the next day. Roberts had booked Allen in the most expensive hotel in Albuquerque and the room was $40 more than Allen brought with him. Roberts paid for the room and wondered who is this software guy who can not afford a room in a hotel.
The next day the Altair with 7 kB had finally passed its memory test and Allen had their BASIC interpreter on a paper tape Bill Gates had created just before Allen left Boston. It took almost 15 minutes for the Teletype to load the program into the Altair then the Teletype printed "MEMORY SIZE?" Allen entered 7168 and the Teletype printed "READY". Both Allen and Roberts were stunned their software and hardware actually worked. They entered several small programs and they worked. The BASIC interpreter was not complete and crashed several times, but Roberts had a high level language for his computer. Roberts hired Allen as Vice President and Director of Software at MITS. Bill Gates also worked at MITS; the October 1975 company newsletter gives his title as "Software Specialist".
Bill Gates remained at Harvard, but continued working on BASIC. Students were allowed to use the DEC PDP-10, but officials were not pleased when they found that Gates was developing a commercial product. The school then implemented a policy that forced Gates to use a commercial time share service to work on BASIC.
On July 22, 1975, MITS signed a contract for the Altair BASIC with Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They received $3000 at signing and a royalty for each copy of BASIC sold, with a cap of $180,000. MITS received an exclusive worldwide license to the program for 10 years. They also had exclusive rights to sublicense the program to other companies and agreed to use its "best efforts" to license, promote and commercialize the program. MITS would supply the computer time necessary for development on a PDP-10 owned by the Albuquerque school district.
MITS realized that BASIC was a competitive advantage and bundled the software with computer hardware sales. Customers who purchased the computer, memory, and I/O boards from MITS could get BASIC for $75; the standalone price was $500. Many hobbyists purchased their hardware from a third-party and "borrowed" a copy of Altair BASIC. Roberts refused to sub-license BASIC to other companies; this led to arbitration in 1977 between MITS and the new "Micro-Soft". The arbitrator agreed with Microsoft and allowed them to license the 8080 BASIC to other companies. Roberts was disappointed with this ruling. Since both Allen and Gates had been employees of MITS and he paid for the computer time, Roberts felt it was his software.
Corporation disk drives and on December 3, 1976, Pertec signed a letter of intent to acquire MITS for $6 million in stock. The deal was completed in May 1977 and Roberts' share was $2 million. The Altair products were merged into the Pertec line, and the MITS facility was used to produce the PCC-2000 small-business computer. The Albuquerque plant was closed in December 1980 and the production was moved to the Pertec plants in Irvine, California.
with Pertec covering hardware products, so he became a gentleman farmer and started a software company. His age could have thwarted his dream of becoming a medical doctor, but nearby Mercer University
started a medical school in 1982. Roberts was in the first class and graduated with an M.D. in 1986. He did his residency in internal medicine and in 1988 established a practice in the small town of Cochran, Georgia
.In 2009, Dr. Roberts was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha, the medical honor society, based on his dual accomplishment of developer of the first personal computer and his devotion to rural medicine.
Roberts married Donna Mauldin in 1991 and they were still married when interviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in April 1997. He was married to Rosa Cooper from 2000 until his death.
Roberts died April 1, 2010 after a months-long bout with pneumonia
, he was 68. His sister, Cheryl R Roberts (b. November 13, 1947 – d. March 6, 2010), of nearby Dublin, Georgia
died at age 62, a few weeks before his death.During his last hospitalization in Macon, Georgia, hospital staffers were stunned to see an unannounced Bill Gates, who had come to pay last respects to his first employer. He was survived by his wife, all six of his children and his mother, Edna Wilcher Roberts. All live in Georgia.
History of personal computers
The history of personal computers began in the 1970s. A personal computer is one intended for individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where the end user's requests are filtered through operating staff, or a time sharing system in which one large processor is shared by many individuals...
". He founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems
Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems
Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems was an American electronics company founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico that began manufacturing electronic calculators in 1971 and personal computers in 1975. Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims founded MITS in December 1969 to produce miniaturized telemetry...
(MITS) in 1970 to sell electronics kits to model rocket
Model rocket
A model rocket is a small rocket that is commonly advertised as being able to be launched by anybody, to, in general, low altitudes and recovered by a variety of means....
ry hobbyists, but the first successful product was an electronic calculator kit that was featured on the cover of the November 1971 issue of Popular Electronics
Popular Electronics
Popular Electronics was an American magazine started by Ziff-Davis Publishing in October 1954 for electronics hobbyists and experimenters. It soon became the "World's Largest-Selling Electronics Magazine". The circulation was 240,151 in April 1957 and 400,000 by 1963. Ziff-Davis published Popular...
. The calculators were very successful and sales topped one million dollars in 1973.
A brutal calculator price war left the company deeply in debt by 1974. Roberts then developed the Altair 8800
Altair 8800
The MITS Altair 8800 was a microcomputer design from 1975 based on the Intel 8080 CPU and sold by mail order through advertisements in Popular Electronics, Radio-Electronics and other hobbyist magazines. The designers hoped to sell only a few hundred build-it-yourself kits to hobbyists, and were...
personal computer that used the new Intel 8080
Intel 8080
The Intel 8080 was the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel and was released in April 1974. It was an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibility...
microprocessor. This was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, and hobbyists flooded MITS with orders for this $397 computer kit.
Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...
and Paul Allen
Paul Allen
Paul Gardner Allen is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates...
joined MITS to develop software and Altair BASIC
Altair BASIC
Altair BASIC was an interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers. It was Microsoft's first product , distributed by MITS under a contract...
was Microsoft's
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
first product. Roberts sold MITS in 1977 and retired to Georgia where he farmed, studied medicine and eventually became a small-town doctor.
Early life and education
Ed Roberts was born on September 13, 1941 in Miami, Florida, to Henry Melvin Roberts and Edna Wilcher Roberts. His younger sister, Cheryl, was born in 1947. During World War II, while his father was in the Army, Roberts and his mother lived on the Wilcher family farm in Wheeler County, GeorgiaWheeler County, Georgia
Wheeler County is a county located in the U.S. state of Georgia. As of 2000, the population was 6,179. The 2007 Census Estimate shows a population of 6,830. The county seat is Alamo.-History:Wheeler County is named after Confederate General Joseph Wheeler...
. After the war, the family returned to Miami, but Roberts would spend his summers with his grandparents in rural Georgia. Roberts' father had an appliance repair business in Miami.
Roberts became interested in electronics and built a small relay-based computer while in high school. He entered University of Miami
University of Miami
The University of Miami is a private, non-sectarian university founded in 1925 with its main campus in Coral Gables, Florida, a medical campus in Miami city proper at Civic Center, and an oceanographic research facility on Virginia Key., the university currently enrolls 15,629 students in 12...
with the intention of becoming a doctor. There he met a neurosurgeon who shared his interest in electronics. The doctor suggested that Roberts get an engineering degree before applying to medical school, and Roberts changed his major to electrical engineering.
Roberts married Joan Clark while at the university, and when she became pregnant Roberts knew he would have to drop out of school to support his new family. The U.S. Air Force
United States Air Force
The United States Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the American uniformed services. Initially part of the United States Army, the USAF was formed as a separate branch of the military on September 18, 1947 under the National Security Act of...
had a program that would pay for college, and in May 1962 he enlisted with the hope of finishing his degree through the Airman Education & Commissioning Program.
After basic training Roberts attended the Cryptographic
Cryptography
Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...
Equipment Maintenance School at Lackland Air Force Base
Lackland Air Force Base
Lackland Air Force Base is a United States Air Force base located west-southwest of San Antonio, Texas. The base is under the jurisdiction of the 802d Mission Support Group, Air Education and Training Command ....
in San Antonio, Texas. Because of his electrical engineering studies at college, Roberts was made an instructor at the Cryptographic School when he finished the course. To augment his meager enlisted man's pay, Roberts worked on several off-duty projects and even set up a one man company, Reliance Engineering. The most notable job was to create the electronics that animated the Christmas characters in the window display of Joske's
Joske's
Joske's, founded by German immigrant Julius Joske in 1867, was a department store chain originally based in San Antonio, Texas. In December 1928, Hahn Department Stores acquired the company along with the Titche-Goettinger department store of Dallas, and three years later Hahn became part of Allied...
department store in San Antonio. In 1965 he was selected for an Air Force program to complete his college degree and become a commissioned officer. Roberts earned an electrical engineering degree from Oklahoma State University in 1968 and was assigned to the Laser Division of the Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB
Kirtland Air Force Base
Kirtland Air Force Base is a United States Air Force base located in the southeast quadrant of the Albuquerque, New Mexico urban area, adjacent to the Albuquerque International Sunport. The base was named for the early Army aviator Col. Roy C. Kirtland...
in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems
Roberts worked with Forrest MimsForrest Mims
Forrest M. Mims III is an amateur scientist, magazine columnist, and author of the popular Getting Started in Electronics and Engineer's Mini-Notebook series of instructional books that was originally sold in Radio Shack electronics stores. Mims graduated from Texas A&M University in 1966 with a...
at the Weapons Laboratory, and both shared an interest in model rocketry. Mims was an advisor to the Albuquerque Model Rocket Club and met the publisher of Model Rocketry
Model Rocketry (magazine)
Model Rocketry was an American hobbyist magazine published from October 1968 to February 1972. The Editor and Publisher was George Flynn and the Managing Editor was Gordon Mandell. The magazine was owned by the editorial staff and the paid circulation reached 15,000 by 1970.The launch of Sputnik in...
magazine at a rocketry conference. This led to an article in the September 1969 issue of Model Rocketry; "Transistorized Tracking Light for Night Launched Model Rockets". Roberts, Mims and two other lab coworkers, Stan Cagle and Bob Zaller, decided they could design and sell electronics kits to model rocket hobbyists. Roberts wanted to call the new company Reliance Engineering, but Mims wanted to form an acronym similar to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MIT. Cagle came up with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, MITS. They advertised the light flasher, a roll rate sensor with transmitter and other kits in Model Rocketry, but the sales were disappointing.
Mims wrote an article about the new technology of light-emitting diodes that was to be published in the November 1970 issue of Popular Electronics
Popular Electronics
Popular Electronics was an American magazine started by Ziff-Davis Publishing in October 1954 for electronics hobbyists and experimenters. It soon became the "World's Largest-Selling Electronics Magazine". The circulation was 240,151 in April 1957 and 400,000 by 1963. Ziff-Davis published Popular...
magazine. He asked the editors if they also wanted a project story, and they agreed. Roberts and Mims developed a LED communicator that would transmit voice on an infrared beam of light to a receiver hundreds of feet away. Readers could buy a kit of parts to build the Opticom LED Communicator from MITS for $15. MITS sold just over a hundred kits. Mims was now out of the Air Force and wanted to pursue a career as a technology writer. Roberts bought out his original partners and focused the company on the emerging market of electronic calculators.
Calculators
Ed Roberts's first real experience with computers came while at Oklahoma State University where engineering students had free access to an IBM 1620IBM 1620
The IBM 1620 was announced by IBM on October 21, 1959, and marketed as an inexpensive "scientific computer". After a total production of about two thousand machines, it was withdrawn on November 19, 1970...
computer. His office at the Weapons Laboratory had the state of the art Hewlett-Packard 9100A
Hewlett-Packard 9100A
The Hewlett-Packard 9100A is an early computer , first appearing in 1968. HP called it a desktop calculator because, as Bill Hewlett said, "If we had called it a computer, it would have been rejected by our customers' computer gurus because it didn't look like an IBM...
programmable calculator in 1968. Roberts had always wanted to build a digital computer and in July 1970, Electronic Arrays announced a set of six LSI integrated circuits that would make a four-function calculator. Roberts was determined to design a calculator kit and got fellow Weapons Laboratory officers, William Yates and Ed Laughlin, to invest in the project with time and money.
The first product was a "four-function" calculator; it could add, subtract, multiply and divide. The display was only 8 digits, but the calculations were performed with 16 digits of accuracy. The MITS Model 816 calculator kit was featured on the November 1971 cover of Popular Electronics. The kit sold for $179 and an assembled unit was $275. Unlike the previous kits MITS had offered, thousands of calculator orders came in each month.
The monthly sales reached $100,000 in March 1973 and MITS moved to a larger building with 10,000 square feet (930 square meters) of space. In 1973 MITS was selling every calculator they could make, 110 employees worked in two shifts assembling calculators. The functionality of calculator integrated circuits increased at a rapid pace and Roberts was designing and producing new models. The popularity of electronic calculators drew the traditional office equipment companies and the semiconductor companies into the market. In September 1972, Texas Instruments (TI) introduced the TI-2500 portable four-function calculator that sold for $120. The larger companies could sell below cost to win market share. By early 1974, Ed Roberts found he could purchase a calculator in a retail store for less than his cost of materials. MITS was now $300,000 in debt, and Roberts was looking for a new hit product.
Altair 8800 computer
Art Salsberg, editorial director of Popular Electronics, was looking for a computer construction project, and his technical editor, Les Solomon, knew MITS was working on an Intel 8080 based computer kit. Roberts assured Solomon that the project would be complete by November to meet the press deadline for the January 1975 issue. The first prototype was finished in October and shipped to Popular Electronics in New York for the cover photograph, but it was lost in transit. Solomon already had a number of pictures of the machine, and the article was based on them. Roberts and Yates got to work on building a replacement. The computer on the magazine cover was an empty box with just switches and LEDs on the front panel. The finished Altair computer had a completely different circuit board layout than the prototype shown in the magazine.
David Bunnell
David Bunnell is a media entrepreneur and technology pioneer who was involved in the earliest days of personal computing revolution and industry...
, came up with three pages of possible names, but Roberts was too busy finishing the computer design to choose a name. There are several versions of the story of who selected Altair as the computer name. At the first Altair Computer Convention (March 1976), Les Solomon told the audience that the name was inspired by his 12-year-old daughter, Lauren. "She said why don't you call it Altair – that's where the [Star Trek] Enterprise is going tonight." The December 1976 issue of Popular Science misquoted this account giving credit to Ed Roberts' daughter. His only daughter, Dawn, was not born until 1983. Both of these versions have appeared in many books, magazines and web sites.
Another editor, Alexander Burawa, recalls a less dramatic version. The Altair was originally going to be named the PE-8 (Popular Electronics 8-bit), but Les Solomon thought this name to be rather dull, so Solomon, Burawa, and John McVeigh decided that: "It's a stellar event, so let's name it after a star." McVeigh suggested "Altair", the twelfth-brightest star in the sky.
When the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics reached readers in mid-December 1974, MITS was flooded with orders. They had to hire extra people just to answer the phones. In February, MITS received 1,000 orders for the Altair 8800. The quoted delivery time was 60 days but it was many more months before the machines were shipped. By August 1975, they had shipped over 5,000 computers.
The Altair 8800 computer was a break-even sale for MITS. They needed to sell additional memory boards, I/O boards and other options to make a profit. The April 1975 issue of the MITS newsletter, Computer Notes, had a page-long price list that offered over 15 optional boards. The delivery time given was 60 or 90 days, but many items were never produced and dropped from future price lists. Initially, Roberts decided to concentrate on production of the computers. Prompt delivery of optional boards did not occur until October 1975.
There were several design and component problems in the MITS 4K Dynamic RAM board. By July, new companies such as Processor Technology
Processor Technology
Processor Technology Corporation was a microcomputer company founded by Bob Marsh and Gary Ingram in April 1975. Its best known product is the Sol-20 computer.-History:...
were selling 4K Static RAM boards with the promise of reliable operation. Ed Roberts acknowledged the 4K Dynamic RAM board problems in the October 1975 Computer Notes. The price was reduced from $264 to $195 and existing purchasers got a $50 refund. MITS released its own 4K Static RAM board in January 1976.
Several other companies started making add-in boards and the first clone, the IMSAI 8080
IMSAI 8080
The IMSAI 8080 was an early microcomputer released in late 1975, based on the Intel 8080 and later 8085 and S-100 bus. It was a clone of its main competitor, the earlier MITS Altair 8800. The IMSAI is largely regarded as the first "clone" computer. The IMSAI machine ran a highly modified version of...
, was available in December 1975.
Altair BASIC
Bill Gates was a student at Harvard UniversityHarvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
and Paul Allen worked for Honeywell
Honeywell
Honeywell International, Inc. is a major conglomerate company that produces a variety of consumer products, engineering services, and aerospace systems for a wide variety of customers, from private consumers to major corporations and governments....
in Boston when they saw the Altair computer on the cover of Popular Electronics. They had previously written software for the earlier Intel 8008
Intel 8008
The Intel 8008 was an early byte-oriented microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel and introduced in April 1972. It was an 8-bit CPU with an external 14-bit address bus that could address 16KB of memory...
microprocessor and knew the Intel 8080 was powerful enough to support a BASIC
BASIC
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....
interpreter. They sent a letter to MITS claiming to have a BASIC interpreter for the 8080 microprocessor. Roberts was interested, so Gates and Allen began work on the software. Both had experience with the Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
PDP-10
PDP-10
The PDP-10 was a mainframe computer family manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10". The first model was delivered in 1966...
minicomputers that they would use. Allen modified the DEC Macro Assembler to produce code for the Intel 8080 and wrote a program to emulate the 8080 so they could test their BASIC without having an Altair computer. Using DEC's BASIC-PLUS language as a guide, Gates determined what features would work with the limited resources of the Altair computer. Gates then started writing the 8080 assembly-language code on yellow legal pads. In February Gates and Allen started using a PDP-10 at Harvard to write and debug BASIC. They also enlisted another Harvard student, Monte Davidoff
Monte Davidoff
Monte Davidoff is an American computer programmer. He graduated from Nicolet High School in Glendale, Wisconsin in 1974. He went on to Harvard University, where he majored in applied mathematics, the department at Harvard that, at the time, included computer science. He also worked at WHRB, the...
, to write the floating-point math routines.
The next day the Altair with 7 kB had finally passed its memory test and Allen had their BASIC interpreter on a paper tape Bill Gates had created just before Allen left Boston. It took almost 15 minutes for the Teletype to load the program into the Altair then the Teletype printed "MEMORY SIZE?" Allen entered 7168 and the Teletype printed "READY". Both Allen and Roberts were stunned their software and hardware actually worked. They entered several small programs and they worked. The BASIC interpreter was not complete and crashed several times, but Roberts had a high level language for his computer. Roberts hired Allen as Vice President and Director of Software at MITS. Bill Gates also worked at MITS; the October 1975 company newsletter gives his title as "Software Specialist".
Bill Gates remained at Harvard, but continued working on BASIC. Students were allowed to use the DEC PDP-10, but officials were not pleased when they found that Gates was developing a commercial product. The school then implemented a policy that forced Gates to use a commercial time share service to work on BASIC.
On July 22, 1975, MITS signed a contract for the Altair BASIC with Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They received $3000 at signing and a royalty for each copy of BASIC sold, with a cap of $180,000. MITS received an exclusive worldwide license to the program for 10 years. They also had exclusive rights to sublicense the program to other companies and agreed to use its "best efforts" to license, promote and commercialize the program. MITS would supply the computer time necessary for development on a PDP-10 owned by the Albuquerque school district.
MITS realized that BASIC was a competitive advantage and bundled the software with computer hardware sales. Customers who purchased the computer, memory, and I/O boards from MITS could get BASIC for $75; the standalone price was $500. Many hobbyists purchased their hardware from a third-party and "borrowed" a copy of Altair BASIC. Roberts refused to sub-license BASIC to other companies; this led to arbitration in 1977 between MITS and the new "Micro-Soft". The arbitrator agreed with Microsoft and allowed them to license the 8080 BASIC to other companies. Roberts was disappointed with this ruling. Since both Allen and Gates had been employees of MITS and he paid for the computer time, Roberts felt it was his software.
Sale to Pertec
In 1976, MITS had 230 employees and sales of $6 million. Roberts was tiring of his management responsibilities and was looking for a larger partner. MITS had always used Pertec ComputerPertec Computer
Pertec Computer Corporation , formerly Peripheral Equipment Corporation , was a computer company based in Chatsworth, California which originally designed and manufactured peripherals such as floppy drives, tape drives, instrumentation control and other hardware for computers.Pertec's most...
Corporation disk drives and on December 3, 1976, Pertec signed a letter of intent to acquire MITS for $6 million in stock. The deal was completed in May 1977 and Roberts' share was $2 million. The Altair products were merged into the Pertec line, and the MITS facility was used to produce the PCC-2000 small-business computer. The Albuquerque plant was closed in December 1980 and the production was moved to the Pertec plants in Irvine, California.
Medical doctor
In late 1977 Roberts returned to rural Georgia and bought a large farm in Wheeler County where he had often visited his grandparents' home in his youth. He had a non-compete agreementNon-compete clause
A non-compete clause , or covenant not to compete , is a term used in contract law under which one party agrees not to pursue a similar profession or trade in competition against another party . As a contract provision, a CNC is bound by traditional contract requirements including the...
with Pertec covering hardware products, so he became a gentleman farmer and started a software company. His age could have thwarted his dream of becoming a medical doctor, but nearby Mercer University
Mercer University
Mercer University is an independent, private, coeducational university with a Baptist heritage located in the U.S. state of Georgia. Mercer is the only university of its size in the United States that offers programs in eleven diversified fields of study: liberal arts, business, education, music,...
started a medical school in 1982. Roberts was in the first class and graduated with an M.D. in 1986. He did his residency in internal medicine and in 1988 established a practice in the small town of Cochran, Georgia
Cochran, Georgia
Cochran is a city in Bleckley County, Georgia, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 5,150. The city is the county seat of Bleckley County.- History :...
.In 2009, Dr. Roberts was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha, the medical honor society, based on his dual accomplishment of developer of the first personal computer and his devotion to rural medicine.
Personal life
Ed Roberts married Joan Clark (b. 1941) in 1962 and they had five sons, Melvin (b. 1963), Clark (b. 1964), John David (b. 1965), Edward (b. 1970), Martin (b. 1975) and a daughter Dawn (b. 1983). They were divorced in 1988.Roberts married Donna Mauldin in 1991 and they were still married when interviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in April 1997. He was married to Rosa Cooper from 2000 until his death.
Roberts died April 1, 2010 after a months-long bout with pneumonia
Pneumonia
Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung—especially affecting the microscopic air sacs —associated with fever, chest symptoms, and a lack of air space on a chest X-ray. Pneumonia is typically caused by an infection but there are a number of other causes...
, he was 68. His sister, Cheryl R Roberts (b. November 13, 1947 – d. March 6, 2010), of nearby Dublin, Georgia
Dublin, Georgia
Dublin is a city in Laurens County, Georgia, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 16,201. The city is the county seat of Laurens County.-History:The original settlement was named after the city Dublin, Ireland....
died at age 62, a few weeks before his death.During his last hospitalization in Macon, Georgia, hospital staffers were stunned to see an unannounced Bill Gates, who had come to pay last respects to his first employer. He was survived by his wife, all six of his children and his mother, Edna Wilcher Roberts. All live in Georgia.
External links
Commentary on Ed Roberts' life and medical practice.- STARTUP: Albuquerque and the Personal Computer Revolution New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science
- Altair 8800 Computer at Vintage-Computer Web Site
- Brief History of the Altair. Copies of Altair articles in Popular Electronics
- Obituary in The IndependentThe IndependentThe Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
by Marcus Williamson